Vatican Protests Exclusion From AIDS Conference

CWNEWS.COM, July 9 — Even though more than a quarter of all AIDS treatment facilities in the world are operated by the Catholic Church, representatives from the Vatican were omitted from the 14th world conference on AIDS in Barcelona last week.

Archbishop Javier Lozano Barragan was impatient toward the current approach to AIDS, which stresses condom distribution and “safe-sex” practices. That approach, he told the online news service, has produced “no visible results.” To the contrary, “the number of AIDS victims is rising, in a terribly important trend.”

Wealthy nations hide facts about AIDS, the archbishop accused, by saying that poverty is the main cause of the disease. However, he argued, “Europe and the United States are largely responsible for exporting AIDS to poor countries through sexual tourism and the spread of libertine attitudes.”

The best way to prevent AIDS, the archbishop concluded, is to adhere to the teachings of the Catholic Church. Sexual abstinence and marital fidelity work “with absolute efficiency, which no one can deny.”

Canada Snubs Christ — or at Least His Vicar

CWNEWS.COM, July 8 — Online Catholic news service CWNews.com reported that Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien might not appear to greet Pope John Paul II when he arrives in Toronto to open World Youth Day on July 22.

Organizers heard the bad news from government officials and made their dissatisfaction known. Chretien's spokesmen insisted that this was not intended as an insult, although the head of government traditionally greets heads of state personally. (As ruler of Vatican City, the Pope has that diplomatic status.)

Then the press staff at the prime minister's office backtracked, according to CWNews.com, saying, “No final decision has been made” about the Pope's visit.

The Vatican's Time Machine

FLASHNEWS.COM, July 2 — Another conspiracy theory has emerged, with the Vatican as the villain.

It seems that the Holy See has a time machine, which it will not share with the world. Wireless Flash, a popular culture news service, reported on a recently published book from New Paradigm Books, a New Age publisher. Father Ernetti's Chronovisor: The Creation and Disappearance of The World's First Time Machine, by paranormal journalist Peter Krassa, tells the story of Benedictine Father Pellegrino Ernetti.

The priest claimed he constructed a time machine in the 1950s and used it to witness historic events and rescue lost manuscripts. According to the publisher, Father Ernetti “was a priest and scientist and musicologist, one of the world's leading authorities on archaic music. He claimed to have yoked the insights of modern physics to the ancient occult knowledge of the astral planes to build, in secret, a time machine — the chronovisor. He asserted that, using the chronovisor as his eyes and ears, he had watched Christ dying on the cross and attended a performance of a now-lost tragedy, Thyestes, by the father of Latin poetry, Quintus Ennius, in Rome in 169 B.C.”

So far, the Holy See has not responded to the reports.